Spill by Daniel Beltrá - in pictures

It was one of the
world's most destructive environmental disasters in human history: in April 2010 an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig killed 11 men and sent 210m gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a black tide covering 68,000 square miles of ocean and spreading along 16,000 miles of coastline.
Spill is the first book from photographer
Daniel Beltrá, who documented the spill from a Cessna floatplane, 3,000ft above the Louisiana coastline. It includes 27 of his award-winning aerial photographs that have gone on show around the world, and an essay by
Barbara Bloemink that gives context to Spill as an artistic response to the environment and nature

Boats gather near remaining oil platforms near the site of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, leaving oily wakes as they move through the polluted water. Nearly one-third of all US oil production comes from 3,500 such platforms in the Gulf of Mexico

Two ships monitor a controlled burn from oil that was spilled from the wellhead. To aid in clean-up efforts, 5,300 vessels of opportunity were hired from around the area. Many strategies were used to attempt to clean up the oil. The most obvious were 411 controlled burns, where huge noxious plumes of inky smoke rose out of the red-hot fires on the surface of the water

A C-130 plane sprays dispersant on oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. More controversial and ultimately more destructive than the fires was the use of the toxic chemical Corexit, a solvent that breaks down lipid membranes of cells. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency telling BP to find a less toxic dispersant, ultimately more than 1.8m gallons were used, despite its toxic nature

'Taken as a whole, the works in the Spill series engender a kind of "sublime melancholy", a reflection of our current self-imposed alienation and careless neglect of our natural environment,' writes art curator Barbara Bloemink in the book's essay

The full consequences of the incident remain unknown - up to 33% of the oil from the disaster still remains thickly spread over miles of the ocean floor. It has destroyed unknown quantities of plant life, fish and dolphins